


July 8th, 1822

by billspilledquill



Series: In one spirit meet and mingle-- [2]
Category: 18th Century CE RPF, Historical RPF, Literary RPF
Genre: Death, F/M, Italian Journey, M/M, Romantic Friendship, also Romantic as in thunderstorms and reciting pope to the flowers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-19 07:42:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20327539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/billspilledquill/pseuds/billspilledquill
Summary: Everything started with Mary and ended with Mary; here are the in-betweens.





	July 8th, 1822

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).

> _Defenceless under the light, _
> 
> _Our world in stupor lies;_
> 
> _Yet, dotted everywhere, _
> 
> _Ironic points of light_
> 
> _Flash out wherever the Just _
> 
> _Exchange their messages:_
> 
> _May I, composed like them_
> 
> _Of Eros and of dust, _
> 
> _Beleaguered by the same _
> 
> _Negation and despair, _
> 
> _Show an affirming flame. _

Over the rimmed edges of a blur in what Percy calls the end and what Mary calls the mountain, Byron leaps over it to show that he is a connoisseur of the deep-rooted sea and of the storm to come.

The rocks, sharp and pointed toward the tip of the hill that Mary’s been sitting near, make a sound against the water when Byron jumps.

“Like a most gracious rabbit,” Mary remarks. How Percy laughs like he would shriek.

“Never seen one that don’t run in tatters when I ran at them.”

Mary doesn’t spare a glance. “I would too, if I saw you.”

Percy kisses her on the cheek, softly, then separates like two branches of the same tree, waiting for a chance to meet again when the wind blows right.

Byron swims like how Percy runs; wild, ruthless, needlessly loud. The splash gobbles up the space that they created between them, however superficially. Mary sits and lets the wind of Geneva make her dress fly to what Percy has insisted to be the edges of the world. If she looks down, she can see Byron making his way to the shore like Hero tried in vain. If she looks up, she can see Percy scratching a tree, his eyes trailing over its skin, amazed by the beauty of nature. She supposes she should tell them both about the storm that is to come.

She dusts off some grass that is sticking from the bottom of her dress. She thinks about monsters and yet to be words of a book that lies inside her. She thinks about all that until she forgets about the two of them, one prevailing over the waves in a dark stormy river, another unwanted child of nature yet beloved in return.

She loves them both, as they all loved; with passion that moulds not the in the shape of heart, but of a pen, for they must write in order to love, and Mary is a lover.

Her fingers twitches and a spot of ink falls on the manuscript. She must write just as Byron must swims and just as Percy must love, they are made from stuff of dreams somehow, of a material yet undiscovered by man and by the masses. And to this she writes, and to this she makes an elegy of.

She crosses a word, making for the next.

* * *

“I take this a tragedy,” Byron says when he comes back soaked in the clothes and dry in the eye, “that none of you saw my good figure coming out from the water. Like a nymph, I would have defied nature.”

Percy’s head is weathered with leaves and wildflowers. “In terms of your capacity for humility, it is a constant achievement,” he mumbles, yet he secretly thinks him right. Percy has never met a man that has successfully characterized himself simply by being in the opposition of things.

“Don’t jest.”

“I was in earnest.”

Byron hears him to it. “Come,” he says, “once more unto the breach, my friend,” and Byron would twitch his lips just the correct way for Percy to follow him as the tilt of that full mouth told him to.

Byron’s club foot makes him slower to walk with, and so, like a cat with all its aristocratic rigour, Byron would walk down the stairs exactly what a puss would when it wants its meal. Percy doesn’t know if he is the provider of it or simply the thing itself. Either way, he does not fancy himself with a collar.

“Miss Shelley still composing?” Byron asks when they are in his room. Percy thinks about Claire and how she might have felt when she first decided to love him. Percy stands erect on his chair when talking about his wife, too excited for social etiquettes.

“She is good, Shelley. You both are good,” says Byron after the excitement subsided, but still palpable in the air. “She might even be better, if you would allow me to say so.”

Byron lays his hand on Percy’s arm, a constant pressure to be reminded of. Percy leans into the touch, almost subconsciously. A flower drops unto Byron’s palm when his hand comes up to stroke a hair away from Percy’s face.

“Good,” Byron says soothingly, and yet an edge of danger seeps through, he clicks his teeth, “good.”

“You can’t possibly know that.”

“Oh, I know. Don’t you think I know everything?”

And Byron grins like he knows he is right and doesn’t need anyone’s permission to be right. Percy comes to put his on Byron’s shoulder. The grin only grows.

Percy is lost, as he often is. He does not doubt about Mary’s success for her story. He does not doubt Byron’s assumption, and he does not doubt himself in the least, yet only in the matter in which they are all fed in. The notion of escaping death with remembrance, scrapes of them snatched in yellow pages and inked letters, stitched in ways that they will only feel but not see.

They must love, Percy thinks, as the candle makes waves of light over Byron’s face, his smile over how good she is, how good he is, how good _they_ both are. We must love one another or die.

The candle snuffles out briefly after that thought, as if Percy has awoken death by realising that everything else is only, in thought or in prayers he did not believe, only love.

* * *

Byron meets Percy and Mary in the middle of the first day he thinks his father is a vampire and the last. That is, he meets them in the middle of his life, if not a little more than half.

“_Oh, stream_,” Percy recites to the slow still river of Geneva on a boat, three roads diverging in four and six routes. Byron breaks a branch, turns it on the bout of his finger. Percy says louder, as if frustrated by the stray of attention, “_whose source is inaccessibly profound; wither do thy mysterious waters tend?_”

Byron hears Mary’s chuckles, her eyes soft and gleaming under the shadow from what he would consider the Elysian trees. They all ignore Percy for the sake of peace, but they both know that Percy’s verses never fail to make them both shudders, however momentarily, however brief in time. Percy is not a clockmaker, but he makes a second too long with what a life could endure.

Mary loves him, he can see that, can even feel the same, for love for a pure boy with almost cherubic features is easy, compulsory to love, but as Byron spends more time with the man, or worse, his words, the realisation that this is a grown man with lines as hard as knots and borders as resilient as mountains was only too easy to make. He supposes that Mary has noticed it, the myth of Shelley that embodied the man, even before death, before themselves, before Percy.

Mary is silent and Percy is not. Byron could not help but follow the stream from where Percy tended the waters, bury his head in it, his eyes stinging under, overlooking the vast profoundness, no edge from where he lay.

“A little too hard on _source_ rather than on _stream_, don’t you think?” Mary says at last, the rambles that Percy was rattling himself with finally strangling under Mary’s words. “Poetry is also about the intonation, dear.”

Percy blinks, Byron is almost surprised to see admiration in those eyes, but they have never inspired anything else when he is around to see it.

Percy crackles, then puts his hand on his breast, Byron’s heart beating. “Oh, _stream_!” He exclaims, looking around him, at Mary, then at Byron, then his limbs, long and precarious in a way that make Byron’s breath hitch, lay awkwardly around both of their shoulder, and he dips his head, with a tone of conspiracy he says, “whose _source_ is inaccessibly _profound_,” he then whispers, which Byron suspects that he only did to make them lean closer. Percy licks his lips, his eyes dark, looking at no one in a way that both feel observed anyway, “_wither_—” he pauses, a laugh escaping his throat, “wither do thy mysterious waters _tend_?”

Mary smiles: “Like that, Percy. Just like that.”

Byron adds: “The lad doth protest too much, methinks.”

The boat shakes in imbalance when Percy moves to stand, casting a shadow before him. Percy looks beautiful, but the lines under his eyes and the odd, almost ugly blotches of red remind him of exactly that no angel had blessed that face nor there are demons to chase from it. Percy is a man with some qualities and many more baseness. Percy stands, for a moment, still, then not.

“I do not think so, milord,” Percy says, his teeth dragging over his bottom lip. Byron catches Mary’s eyes.

“You just proved yourself wrong, dear,” Mary comments, amused. Her glance meets the grass. They are almost to shore. “For god’s sake,” she says, folding her hands, “let us sit upon the ground—”

“And tell sad stories of the death of kings,” he ends, thinking how the horizon stretches low enough for Mary’s eyes and how moved she is by it.

A little pin, which is Percy’s soft, unruly hair, bores through the wind, and can, Byron is sure, bear through a castle wall.

And then, Byron thinks with characteristic melancholy, when Percy tears down this institution that England was build around for and acted as, _he_ will make the farewell to the king.

* * *

Mary clasps over the wrinkles of her dress when the baby stops crying, and harder again, when she starts.

Percy is silent, and Mary is not.

“We must love each other or die,” Percy says quietly.

Mary’s red rimmed lids and her tight balled fist. Her whole rigid body resists to the words, her hands defiant to the very idea. Mary closes her eyes tightly, not looking at her child who is now in that miserable conclave that all her beloved people lie to; that of the grave.

Percy tries to touch, she escapes it.

“Mary—"

She nods once.

* * *

“I have wanted to see Venice, the Alps, and Parmesan cheeses,” that is what Percy hears on his first visit to Byron in Italy, “it was once the greenest island of my imagination.”

“Once?” Confronts Percy, fingers tapping ceaselessly on the table, “I would think it unfortunate if the beauty of Venice disappears once dreams meet the eye.”

Byron speeds up the pace. Percy hasn’t eaten anything this morning. “Well,” Byron says with sarcasm, “if it were so, then dreams are better left dreamt, Shelley.”

Percy rolls his eyes, makes sure that he sees it. “I am expected to hear this from you no more than if you were a Venetian nobleman of ancient family and of great fortune.”

With a ridiculous name, Percy adds to himself triumphantly. He will think about it very carefully on his way back home.

Byron pushes the bottle of wine to his side. Percy makes a move to decline, but Byron laughs with the tone of perfect cordiality and says: “Just a cup, Shelley. Drink no longer water but use a little wine for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmities.”

Percy makes a face, “being well-conversed in Paul’s sayings is hopefully not a lasting reaction of our friendship, Albe.”

A crane is in his view, along with horses outside of the window. Byron props his elbow, his head resting on his fist. “You needn’t worry about it,” he says, almost as an afterthought, “Shiloh.”

Percy rubs his hands together, his index with his thumb. Byron has been intrigued with the Southcott scandal, and her baby, the messiah Shiloh. If only Percy can subtract the inherent insult from the name and rejoice in it.

Percy smiles, tight-lipped, “I’m glad,” he says, then armed with a courage and enthusiasm he has not felt before, tilts his head and drinks the whole cup with one swift, short motion.

Byron raises his glass, amusement shining through his gaze, the face of a society gentleman, “I am definitely happy to see you too.”

Percy is sure that there is something more to know about Byron, even more than his poetry and ideals and private life that half of England is so mad about; he is sure that beneath all that aristocratic clamour and wordiness there is a Byron exactly like the same, yet like the dark, aged, covered face from a coin: when he would exert confidence without irony, mirth without gloom. There is something about Byron that goes beyond him, and what Percy really thinks of him is that he is as mad as the winds, but as free.

“The pleasure is mine,” says he, “mostly mine.”

They later drink more, Byron his third cup with Percy his second glass of water, gossiping about all the trivialities of life that gentlemen of their ranks share – of _Byron’s_ rank, Percy reminds himself, as much as he loads all these travails and falsehoods. Later and at the words in between, there are secrets about his housing of a thousand animals in his estate, Percy’s travels and Mary’s news, and of course, Byron’s shared intimacy in Italy, as debouch happens whenever Byron needs it to happen.

“You must be acquainted,” he says, “with madness and sin.”

“I am mad,” Byron lays his hand on his, “I am doing sin. You speak of devils with such fondness; I have only assumed you would know. You told me to annihilate God while you destroy the Devil, and then we make a Heaven entirely to our own mind—is that madness?”

Byron’s palms are warm, cold on the fingertips. They remind him of Mary’s, soft and unyielding. It is not the first time that Percy finds himself thinking that it does not matter, all that talk and what all that reeks, he finds himself once again face to face with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

“We are most fortunate,” Byron says sharply. Byron never says anything without a sort of tender, self-contained pride, “to love in such an age of looming change.”

“You don’t love right—”

“I love in haste,” Byron’s eyes narrow, lifts his hand, lips grazing his knuckles. “There’s no wrong in hating the leisure of it.”

Percy realises that they must have stepped away from pleasant conversations to somewhere never ventured before. It makes his blood rush to his ears, and his eyes, bearing signs of annoyance from Byron, shine with the challenge.

“What if I were your lover? Would that be of leisure?”

Byron looks startled for a second, then laughs. “It could.”

Percy sets the trap and feels the nets all around him. “Then show me now, if you care so much about time.”

This must be, Percy believes and recoils from, a perfect image of the sea, the end of the world, and the man that cannot swim.

* * *

Mary likes to be kissed in the jaw. It tickles her and just safe enough to be enjoyable. She likes it when the kiss is slow and lavish. She doesn’t like getting kissed on the mouth.

She is sleeping alone tonight, her bedsheets fresh and cold and safe. Her hands rub them warm, and she sighs, sound.

“Come in,” she says with her eyes closed.

“I thought you were asleep,” Percy says sheepishly.

“Your presence is loud in the household,” she says.

It’s barely a house-- a room decorated with to the barest minimum. The bed cricks every time she dares to move, and sometimes rats would come, unwelcomed. Every visitor can be heard from a yard away simply by the mounting of their shoes.

“I didn’t want to wake you –"

“You looked after me,” Mary says simply, a small smile appears on her face, a red across her pale complexion, “unless I mistook you for Sebastian and that you are his twin sister.”

The lines around her eyes crease as her smile deepens. “In love with the Duke yet, Viola?”

Percy laughs, “I hold you both in the highest affection –”

“Come here,” Mary gestures the other empty half of her bed. And when Percy wants to argue some more, she shakes her head and, imperiously, with her chin pointing him, “come, if you’re my suitor, then be what you play.”

Mary likes to be kissed, and her head swings in the wake of soft, warm lips, and she is happy, content even, to be loved in every way.

* * *

“Byron,” he can hear him say, his finger tracing the inner vein of his arm. Percy saying his name as witches whisper Macbeth’s, “you’re terrible.”

He stills, the wild and whirling words inside his head composing something like a sonnet. He smiles, edging toward cruelty. “So were all the great figures in history.”

Percy blinks. “I haven’t meant by anything else.”

Byron remembers of his father. Mad Jack having his riches thrown away just to spite his family. He is terrible, and a vampire. “Who are you going to say that for if you fall in the water and I’ll have to save you because of your incompetence in artful skills?”

Percy hums, he puts his hands behind his head. The wind making a mess of his hair. “Well then,” he says, “I’ll know when you do.” That said, he guides him toward the river.

The weather in _Uniti_, this vast, blue wonder, is untamed and tales of monsters have spurned here, about breast-less women and sirens. Percy calls on him, (_Albe_, and sometimes, _the Armenian_,) when the water reaches over his knees.

“See?” Percy laughs with triumph, “I am of water, and it won’t hurt me.”

“I can’t save you every time, Shelley,” he says when the man continues to walk into the vastness of the river that they both mistaken for sea. “I can teach you how to swim.”

Percy doesn’t look back, nor does he stop the steps. He simply says, amongst the thunder and the wind and the waves beating his clothes wet, “you will save me, Byron,” only his hair untouched, swirling in the weather like birds in those old folklore tales, “you would plunge yourself in the dark unknown and save me.”

“I value my life and hold it in high esteem, Shelley,” he finally grabs him by the back of his collar, stopping him from venturing further. “I will not give my life for yours.”

A shrill, high-pitched laugh coming from Percy, and he turns around with all the innocence of life in his eyes, crying, “then I would love thee then,” he mauls, “as I love thee now.”

As he kisses him, Percy drags in deep into the water, and much, much later, Byron thinks he heard him say, with sea in his mouth and wonder in his eyes, about how he would be in love with death if it were for a place like this, how Byron loved, and beloved in return.

* * *

Mary writes to Byron after Percy’s death, and to Jane after Byron’s. She dies as many times as her children did. After that, death is like an enclave of some sorts, where her best loved people belong and share without her guidance.

She goes back sometimes, in Boscombe, to the wild and temping things of her youth, the water, the lovers, the sky turning grayer with every glance, but only books she can make an eternity of, so she tries just that.

The pain from paralysis stops her from writing and reading for some days now, and she lets her son and his wife to take care most things. She asks them to read for her, sometimes, when things get awfully dull, about her travels in Germany and Italy and how Young Italy is surging and evolving as fast and as still. She concerns herself with politics and sleeping, even if they often contradict each other.

“So much to say about anything, Mother,” her son says fondly. “You’re made with the stuff of dreams.”

Her arrogance stops her from answering that it’s because of him, that survives, and of her mother, that made her live instead. Even Percy, dead and his calcified heart uselessly wrapped in her desk, makes her alive with what remains.

“We must love one another or die,” Mary answers with her usual smile, a tired yet happy one. “I feel I could be immortal.”

There is something of a myth among her circles that she can achieve immortality by writing. Percy never did, Byron tried, and Mary does not bother. She lives, after all, better with the dead.

And she dies knowing full well she loves better like this, too, with monsters at her sleeves and words in her head, lovers in her bed and death on its knees.


End file.
